{"id":2252079,"date":"2026-01-27T01:08:54","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T01:08:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2252079"},"modified":"2026-01-27T01:08:54","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T01:08:54","slug":"at-studio-bootsie-donnie-carters-private-paintings-go-public-arts-entertainment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/at-studio-bootsie-donnie-carters-private-paintings-go-public-arts-entertainment\/","title":{"rendered":"At Studio Bootsie, Donnie Carter\u2019s private paintings go public | Arts & Entertainment"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A Kenwood basement-turned-gallery will highlight the works of long-time South Side painter Donnie Carter next month. The show, titled \u201cSigns of Life,\u201d opens Feb. 1 at Studio Bootsie<\/a><\/span> and will run through the month.<\/p>\n

Carter is an 87-year-old sign painter, cartoonist and muralist. He\u2019s lived in Chicago since 1955, and his work can be seen at several banks and grocery stores in the area, as well as in the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center. The exhibition will primarily showcase Carter\u2019s private work \u2014 paintings that have lived in his apartment for years, though some of his sign-lettering will also be on display.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the kind of art Dawn Brennan said she wants Studio Bootsie to bring into public view.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt like Donnie was interesting partly because of his life story, but also because he makes these paintings for himself, they are untrained but they have a lot of appeal and I think they are absolutely worth showing,\u201d said Brennan, who opened the studio in July.<\/p>\n

Carter was born in 1939 in the small town of Sunflower, Mississippi, where he worked on cotton plantations from a young age.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I lived in the country, I was picking cotton during the day, and painting pictures all night,\u201d Carter told the Herald. \u201cWhen we were working for this one guy, he told me, \u2018stay here, I want you to paint the numbers on the cotton sacks.\u2019 At that time I was around twelve years old. It was just natural with me.”<\/p>\n

He said that although he felt like a \u201cChicago boy living in the South,\u201d he takes pride in his roots. Carter sees his experience working in the fields as deeply formative to his artistic development.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was always good at art, but picking cotton taught me how to master a technique,\u201d said Carter, who, to this day, lists \u201cmaster cotton picker\u201d as a skill on his resume.<\/p>\n

The oldest piece in the exhibition, a self-portrait painted at age 13, offers an intimate look into this time in the artist’s life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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A self-portrait of Donnie Carter, 1952.<\/p>\n

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\n Leo Vernor<\/span>
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He moved to Chicago just a few years after painting that self-portrait, and made a living painting signs for grocery stores and banks. When he wasn\u2019t sign painting, Carter spent his free time sketching musicians in jazz clubs on the South Side (among them Sam \u201cbepop\u201d Thomas), many of whom were his close friends. From these sketches, he would create larger paintings, some of which will be on display at the exhibition.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was never a sculptor or anything, so one of the reasons I painted musicians was to get a chance to practice painting their hands. When you paint a trumpet player, you have to paint the hands right,\u201d Carter said, before raising his hands to his face and performing an impromptu mouth-trumpet solo.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Carter\u2019s philosophy for art-making is straightforward. If something piques his interest, he paints it, whether it\u2019s a picture in a magazine, or a scene conjured up in his own mind. It is for this reason that his work doesn\u2019t adhere to one specific style or form, a fact most evident in a piece he titled \u201cFirst Day of School,\u201d a pointillism-style painting that stands out from the rest of the work on display.<\/p>\n

\u201cI decided to do something different. I used the back of the brush, no brush strokes, just dots. For two hours every night I dipped the back of the brush in paint and made dots on the canvas,\u201d said Carter, calling the painting his \u201cmasterpiece.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cFirst Day of School\u201d by Donnie Carter, 2024.<\/p>\n

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\n Leo Vernor<\/span>
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Though varied in style, all of his paintings carry a sense of ease, something that the artist himself exudes. Though Carter spoke much about problems of class and racial inequality, violence and injustice, he said his art-making is not about political or social statements. Instead, Carter\u2019s work, whether it\u2019s an impressionist painting or a billboard, comes from that same part of himself that motivated him to make his own toys at 7 years old \u2014 an innate drive to create.<\/p>\n

\u201cSigns of Life\u201d will have an opening reception on Feb. 1 from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. at Studio Bootsie, 4335 S. Lake Park Ave. Studio Bootsie is open to the public on Sundays from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. or by appointment.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.hpherald.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Kenwood basement-turned-gallery will highlight the works of long-time South Side painter Donnie Carter next month. The show, titled \u201cSigns of Life,\u201d opens Feb. 1 at Studio Bootsie and will run through the month. Carter is an 87-year-old sign painter, cartoonist and muralist. He\u2019s lived in Chicago since 1955, and his work can be seen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2252080,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[349474,354760,374394],"class_list":["post-2252079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-arts_and_entertainment","tag-evening_digest","tag-exhibitions"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/At-Studio-Bootsie-Donnie-Carters-private-paintings-go-public.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2252079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2252079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2252079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2252081,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2252079\/revisions\/2252081"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2252080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2252079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2252079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2252079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}